Who Are The Most Influential People And Companies To Keep An Eye On In API Space

19 Sep 2017

I am spending two days this week with the Capital One DevExchange team outside of Washington DC, and they’ve provided me with a list of questions for one of our sessions, which they will be recording for internal use. To prepare, I wanted to work through my thoughts, and make sure each of these answers were on the tip of my tongue–here is one of those questions, along with my thoughts.

When it comes to the most influential people and companies in the API space that I am keeping an eye on, it always starts with the API pioneers. This begins with SalesForce, eBay, and Amazon. Then it moves into the social realm with Twitter and Facebook. All of these providers are still moving and shaking the space when it comes to APIs, and operating viable API platforms that dominate in their sector. While I do not always agree with the direction these platforms are taking, they continue to provide a wealth of healthy, and bad practices we should all be considering as part of our own API operations, even if we aren’t doing it at a similar scale.

Secondarily, I always recommend studying the cloud giants. Amazon is definitely the leader in this space, with their pioneering, first mover status, but Google is in a close second, and enjoys some API pioneering credentials with Google Maps, and other services in their stack. Even though Microsoft waiting so long to jump into the game I wouldn’t discount them from being an API mover and shaker with their Azure platform making all the right moves in the last couple of years as they played catch up. These three API providers are dictating much of what we know as being APIs in 2017, and will continue to do so in coming years. They will be leading the conversation, as well as sucking the oxygen out of other conversations they do not think are worthy. If you aren’t paying attention to the cloud APIs, you won’t remain competitive, no matter how well you do APIs.

Next, I always recommend you study the cool kids of APIs. Learning about how Twilio, Stripe, SendGrid, Keen, and the other API-first movers and shakers are doing what they do. These platforms are the gold standard when it comes to how you handle the technical, business, and politics of API operations. You can spend weeks in their platforms learning from how they craft their APIs, and operate their communities. These companies are all offering viable resources using web APIs, that developers need. They are offering these resources up in a way that is useful, inviting, and supportive of their consumers. They are actively investing in their API community, keeping in sync with what they are needing to be successful. It doesn’t matter which industry you are operating in, you should be paying attention to these companies, and learning from them on a regular basis.